The Origin of Others

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, 136 Seiten, Format (B × H): 116 mm x 188 mm, Gewicht: 198 g

Reihe: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

“The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world.” —Nell Irvin Painter, New Republic America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books—Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy. If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Morrison, Toni

Weitere Mitwirkende

Coates, Ta-Nehisi

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gewalt und Diskriminierung: Soziale Aspekte

Über Autor(innen)

Coates, Ta-Nehisi
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of <i>The Beautiful Struggle</i> and <i>Between the World and Me</i>.

Morrison, Toni
Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. The author of numerous critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University.